I read in the newspapers yesterday that John Locke, an insurance salesman and amateur writer from Louisville, Kentucky, has become the first self-publishing author to sell 1 million e-books via the Amazon Kindle electronic reader. I am not sure whether to applaud this of burst into tears. Of course, I wish Mr Locke every success with his writing but that apart, I wonder where we are going. John Locke has joined a select band of eight authors who have achieved in excess of 1 million sales via the Kindle e-book reader. The difference in his case is that he has never published in old fashioned book form and he doesn't have his own publisher and publicists. For each book sold at 70p on Kindle, he receives 25p a percentage return way beyond the expectations of any normal publication. If the average price of one of his books last year was 60p, he will have earned himself £150,000, which would be a staggering amount for 99% of authors. Of course, much of this was in the USA and we are still well behind them in terms of e-book sale. Nevertheless, Amazon have reported that in 2010 sales of e-books in the UK rose four fold to £16 million.
I have no problems with people reading books on the Kindle machine - it is much better than not reading books at all. But I still think of the Kindle and similar machines as handy devices to carry on commuter trains and the like. To settle down for a good read, I want an old-fashioned book. The trouble is that I am falling behind technology. There are many things I prefer to do the old way. Technology should be used to increase the range of options available, not as an excuse to eliminate something that happens to be inconvenient for some commercial organisation of other. I have a mobile phone - but I hardly use it. I like it to make essential phone calls when I am on the move. I do not need it for sending silly text messages or having pointless telephone conversations on matters so banal that accidental eavesdroppers - the tied audience - start to feel suicidal. I do not want cheque books to be phased out for the convenience of the banks. We have done far too much already for the convenience of the banks. I do not want to use DIY checkouts in supermarkets so they can cut back on staff. How long before supermarkets become warehouses and they tell us to get our own stuff off stacked up pallets?
But on books I have a problem because I love books. I have several thousand books in my home and storage is an increasing problem. But I do not want to get rid of any of my books. Some get a bit faded and tatty with age and, almost valueless, they have to be dumped. The rest I want to keep. I like a house to be full of books. Children brought-up in houses with no books do not do so well at school as those who are surrounded by books - although there are other factors in such variations. Recently, Newcastle University carried out a survey of new students over a period of 3 years and found that 25% of them had managed to get to the university without ever having read any book completely. I find this so bizarre that I wonder about the academic abilities of the people involved. Should these non-readers be in a university at all?
Over the last 30 years or so book shops have been disappearing from our streets. The primary reason is that mass selling books - popular fiction - are now sold by the supermarkets and on line at heavily discounted prices. Running a bookshop is now a recipe for financial failure. Even the second-hand bookshops have gone. They have lost out to Oxfam. Oxfam gets its books for nothing and has many unpaid staff. It is difficult for a specialist second-hand shop to compete with that. It is not so bad for the buyer - even if the choice in Oxfam is rather limited.
There is only one big chain specialist book shop left on the High Streets of Britain - Waterstones - and they are being sold off by the owner, HMV, a company with lots of other problems caused by on-line publishing and discount selling - in some cases to the point of zero. I hope all these shops don't disappear. I still like going poking about in book shops and record shops. I have fond memories of Foyle's book shop on the Charing Cross Road with its unrestructured Victorian layout, with all its nooks and crannies and the vast piles of books. I have spent many happy hours in there.
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